Bella sits with them for breakfast.

Shavri smiles at her and finishes her story about the new trick for Healing bones more cleanly that she's been trying to work out on mice. "Bella, it's too bad Tadri had to go home," she says at the end. "He thought you were so interesting – I think he was shy around you the other day, though, you are very impressive and I guess that's intimidating." (The face she makes hints that the 'intimidating' half is confusing to her.) 

"Huh. Did he say why he had to go?"

"Something about his father being sick, I think? He's from pretty far away." 

"Oh? Why?"

(Bella's conversational options out loud are still limited but she has decided that today she'll make a point of trying.)

"...Why is he from far away? I mean, presumably he grew up there, it's some town I forget the name of but it's not even technically in Valdemar." 

"Sorry. I meant 'where'."

"...Damn it, what was it called? It's not Warford, that's the one in Karse, I knew a girl whose father came from there, but I think it starts with 'W' too." 

"It doesn't matter. Thank you."

Shavri nods and then starts telling Vanyel how Gemma is trying to figure out what blood is made of. 

Vanyel is making listening noises at mostly the right times but also keeps staring off into space and catching himself.

You okay?

:...Um, mostly? It's kind of hard to focus: 

Makes sense. I think Shavri's absent friend may've been our spy.

:Oh: Vanyel mentally replays the last few minutes of conversation, and the last week. :That...would make sense. Damn it. I bet Shavri told him so many things. She talks a lot: 

Yeah. But knowing it was just a person chatting with her makes me feel better.

:He might be a Mindspeaker too. But Shavri has really good shields, I don't think he could've got anything off her without her noticing: And it doesn't seem like he would have needed to, to explain everything Leareth had seemed to know. 

A mental nod. Her food's all gone. "See you all later!"

Vanyel waves to her and Shavri and heads off to attempt to focus on the actual work he's meant to be doing. 

He's still avoiding leaving his surface thoughts open to Yfandes at all. That...probably isn't very sustainable, he's already noticing that without her prods and reassurances he's doing a lot more pointless ruminating and in a worse mood than usual. He can cope until he figures out a better solution, though.

Realistically nothing she learns is going to change Bella's priority away from "get ahold of her friends in Arda". She keeps working on that. Winds up spending most of the day in the relay room staring at the earcuff, asking for mana from everybody who ends a shift there if they have any left after their task.

She'll get lots of mana, then – with the new more frequent relay shifts, most of them are pretty short. 

Tran shows up at one point. "...Hey, Bella, have you seen Van lately? He, um, no-showed last night, we were going to...do a thing...and I can't find him with Mindspeech." 

"I saw him at breakfast but not since."

"...All right, thanks." Tran sends his message and lets her have his remaining mana and leaves. 

She's using up all her mana analyzing her earcuff. She misses her crystal ball.

Eventually she cuts it out for the day to drop by Healers'.